About Oneness

Oneness is very simple: everything is included and allowed to live according to its true nature. This is the secret that is being revealed, the opportunity that is offered. How we make use of this opportunity depends upon the degree of our participation, how much we are prepared to give ourselves to the work that needs to be done, to the freedom that needs to be lived.

Oneness is not a metaphysical idea but something so simple and ordinary. It is in every breath, in the wing-beat of every butterfly, in every piece of garbage left in the city streets. This oneness is life, life no longer experienced solely through the fragmented vision of the ego, but known within the heart, felt in the soul. This oneness is the heartbeat of life. It is creation’s recognition of it’s Creator. In this oneness life celebrates itself and its divine origin.

The modern world lies under a pervasive sense of anguish, of being abandoned, or at least experiencing God as absent. Yet events that seem to turn our lives upside down and inside out are part of God’s redemptive plan, not only for us, but for the world in which we live. God may be preparing a great awakening for the world, if God can find enough people to cooperate in this mysterious plan.

— Thomas Keating

The realization that every act, every word, every thought of ours not only influences our environment but for some mysterious reason forms an integral and important part of the Universe, fits into it as if by necessity so to say, in the very moment we do, or say, or think it – is an overwhelming and even shattering experience. The tremendous responsibility of it is terrifying. If all of us only knew that the smallest act of ours, or a tiny thought, has such far-reaching effects as to set in motion forces which perhaps could shatter a galaxy…If we know it deeply and absolutely, if this realization becomes engraved permanently on our hearts, on our minds, how careful we would act and speak and think. How precious life would become in its integral oneness.

— Irina Tweedie

All the phenomena of existence are one single thing in the ultimate dimension of the unborn.

— from the Dzogchen Semde

We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come all the many particulars.

— Heraclitus

This is the age of Holy Spirit, this is the age of the universal principle — the open, flexible field of consciousness, the understanding of the unity of life in the multiplicity of human experience, so that we find in our culture again that hidden unity which transcends the fate of multiplicity and nemesis. As I see it this creative spirit which has entered our world is causing such disturbance that it will have to be answered by the spirit of the earth which we have denied as much as we have denied the spirits of the higher worlds. We have denied the spirit of the earth, and that spirit of the earth has to appear in woman. The meeting of the spirit of the earth and the spirit of the other world is one of the great moments that, I believe, will come in the future history of culture.

— Cecil Collins from The Vision of the Fool and Other WritingsAll rights reserved, the Tate Gallery

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.

— Albert Einstein

How can the divine Oneness be seen?
In beautiful forms, breathtaking wonders,
awe-inspiring miracles?
The Tao is not obliged to present itself
in this way.

If you are willing to be lived by it, you will
see it everywhere, even in the most
ordinary things.

— Lao Tsu

Chandogya Upanishad

In the beginning was only Being,
One without a second.
Out of himself he brought forth the cosmos
And entered into everything in it.
There is nothing that does not come from him.
Of everything he is the innermost Self.
He is the truth; he is the Self supreme.
You are that, Shvetaketu; you are that.

Merge in the sea and become one with it,
Forgetting they were ever separate streams,
So do all creatures lose their separateness
When they merge at last into pure Being.
There is nothing that does not come from him.
Of everything he is the innermost Self.
He is the truth; he is the Self supreme.
You are that, Shvetaketu; you are that!

Tao Te Ching
If the people of the world were wise enough
to plant the root of their lives
deep within the Subtle Origin
Then the worldly affairs of life
would coherently follow their natural course
and harmony would abound of its own nature…
Then the peaceful order of the universe prevails
and unity manifests again of its own accord.

— from the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tsu, trans. Hua-Ching Ni

See the One — know the One and affirm that it is
One
Whether at the beginning or at the end, all of this
is only one single thing
Alas the eye of man sees double.

— Attar from The Book of Secrets

How wonderful that a single Essence should
Refract itself like light, a single source
Into a million essences and hues.

— Shâh Ne’matollâh from The Drunken Universe

When you make the two one and
When you make the inner as the outer and the above
As below, and when
You make the male and the female into a single one
Then you shall enter the kingdom.

— The Gospel of Thomas

The soul is all things together…. And since it is the center of all things, it has the forces of all. Hence it passes into all things. And since it is the true connection of all things, it goes to the one without leaving the others … therefore it may rightly be called the center of nature, the middle term of all things, the face of all, the bond and juncture of the universe.

— from The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino by Marsilio Ficino

For those who are awake the cosmos is one.

— Heraclitus

Listen, O dearly beloved!
I am the reality of the world, the center of the circumference,
I am the parts and the whole.
I am the will established between Heaven and Earth

— Ibn ‘Arabî

A hundred things
a million or more
if you look to their reality
are one